NCAA Tournament

BOSTON (CBS) – More than three million U.S. workers will spend at least an hour watching college hoops during business hours. The reason: we all want to keep track of our well-thought-out brackets.

Here’s some sobering news: no matter how much you agonized over your picks, experts say your odds of making a perfect bracket are so slim, you may as well play the lottery. DePaul University math professor Jeff Bergen has posted a video breaking down the algebraic formula behind the probability of perfect brackets. Those of us who completely guess which teams will win, have a one in more than nine quintillion chance of predicting every single outcome correctly. That’s the number nine followed by 18 zeroes.

“If you gave every man, woman, and child an equal piece of nine quintillion dollars, everyone in the U.S. would get 30 billion dollars,” says Bergen.

Of course that won’t keep us from our national obsession. One survey estimates Thursday and Friday’s games will cost companies 134 million dollars in lost productivity.